Greenwich Village's food-tour circuit runs through genuine neighborhood institutions, like Mamoun's Falafel, open on MacDougal Street since 1971, and Faicco's, an Italian pork store dating to 1900.
These are small-group walking tours with several tastings spread over a couple of miles, so book ahead, wear comfortable shoes, and pace your appetite rather than filling up at the first stop.
Greenwich Village keeps a street plan the rest of Manhattan lost. It was already built up when the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 ruled a grid across the island, so it was left alone, which is why West 4th Street crosses West 10th, 11th and 12th, and why walking tours here spend nearly as much time on the geography as on the food. Washington Square, where most of them gather, was a potter's field until the 1820s and something like twenty thousand burials are still beneath it. The historic district around it was designated in 1969 and remained the city's largest for four decades.
The food sits on the same history. Bleecker Street was the spine of one of the largest Italian-speaking neighborhoods in the country, and several of its shops have outlasted the community that supported them: Faicco's, a pork store founded in 1900 on Elizabeth Street and on Bleecker since 1951; Murray's Cheese, opened in 1940; John's, a coal-oven pizzeria from 1929 that has never sold a slice. Around the corner on MacDougal, Mamoun's has been selling falafel since 1971, one of the first Middle Eastern counters in the city.
Foods of NY has run tours through this ground since 1999 and other operators have followed. Expect roughly three hours on foot, a small group, and a run of tastings that add up to a full meal, so arrive hungry rather than fed.
Be clear about what you are buying. Stops change with leases and menus, so treat any shop named in advance as an example rather than a promise, and nearly all of them are walk-ins you could visit on your own. What the tour supplies is a route, portions ordered ahead so you are not queueing, and someone to connect what you are eating to the block you are standing on.
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Greenwich Village, or simply the Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village also contains several subsections, including the West Village west of Seventh Avenue and the Meatpacking District in the northwest corner of Greenwich Village.
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